The US space force, a standalone branch of the US military charged with securing US “interests in, from, and to space”, has cancelled a multibillion-dollar program to develop a classified military communications satellite.
The termination of the Northrop Grumman program was made because of increased costs, difficulties developing its payload and a schedule delay, Bloomberg reported, citing a regulatory filing and people familiar with the decision.
Last month, Northrop’s CFO, David Keffer, appeared to refer to the project’s cancellation in an earnings call when he mentioned a decrease in space unit sales partly “reflects declines in a restricted program due to shifts in government priority”.
Reports of the cancellation of the classified program come a day after the head of the House intelligence committee, Mike Turner, called on the Biden administration to declassify information on what he called a “serious national security threat”, which was later reported to involve Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.
ABC News and the New York Times cited unnamed sources as saying that the security threat Turner was referring to involved Russia’s potential deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in space. It was also reported that US allies had been briefed on the intelligence and the alleged Russian capability was still in development and not a current threat.
“Russia has been conducting several experiments with manoeuvring satellites that might be designed to sabotage other satellites,” Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, said.
Kristensen warned that the placement of nuclear weapons in space would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and that any Russian threat to put nuclear weapons in space could be designed to add to pressure on the US and its allies to end their military support for Ukraine.
Still, the announcements point to increasing focus by countries’ military forces on jamming space communications and develop space-based targeting. David Burbach, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, has described the Russia–Ukraine war as “perhaps the first two-sided space war” and “a potential harbinger of the future”.
The decision to cancel the $841m Northrop Grumman program – described in Pentagon nomenclature as a “termination of convenience” – was reportedly spearheaded by Frank Calvelli, the air force’s assistant secretary for space acquisition.
Earlier this month, secretary of the air force, Frank Kendall, unveiled a 24-point plan to reshape the air force and the space force to ensure “continued supremacy in those domains and while also better posturing the services to deter and, if necessary, prevail in an era of Great Power Competition”.
“Investments in space capabilities have increased the effectiveness of operations in every other domain,” Space Force administrators announced. “The US military is faster, better connected, more informed, more precise and more lethal because of its ability to harness space effectively.”
Among the re-optimization aims, it said, was to implement “space force readiness standards that reflect operations under contested conditions rather than those of a benign environment”.
